Inside Facebook Report: Most Growing Middle East Countries

If you are not on Facebook, you are most probably receiving continuous friends’ invites to register on Facebook, or if you are on Facebook already with email notification turned ON, you are most probably receiving continuous friends’ connect as well who recently joined the site.

Facebook is evolving worldwide and it’s happening in the Middle East too.

Facebook has significantly grown in the Middle East after launching the Arabic version in March this year. Facebook has gained most of its 9 million users in the Middle East region (excluding Israel), including nearly 620,000 in the past month. As a sign of its ongoing growth, some countries are now showing higher percentage growth.

In Qatar and United Arab Emirates, more than 20% of the total population is on the site — putting these countries in the top quartile of the nearly 100 countries that Facebook reports country data on. In Lebanon and Bahrain, it’s more than 15 percent.And in terms of hard numbers, Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia all have more than one million monthly active Facebook users, with the UAE and Morocco getting close. While the region is, overall, not adding as many users as other parts of the world, four countries had growth rates of more than 10% last month: Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, according to Inside Facebook.

In all Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia (KSA) continues to be the country with the most users, and UAE ranked second. Qatar has by far has the highest internet penetration in the region and it’s evolving significant lately.

Accordingly to Inside Facebook, the report shows a big caveat here: Turkey. It would be in the lead if we were to count it as part of the Middle East. The country gained 1.07 million new users last month to reach 14.5 million people — 20.5% of the population.

Tarek is the founder and chief researcher at Youngberry, a youth research and marketing firm dedicated to the region. Tarek founded interactiveME.com and previously worked as Manager at Flip Media (Interactive Agency), Bayt.com (Job Site) and Consulting House Qatar (Consulting firm).
He is researcher and writer on internet & disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship, and youth culture.

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As mentioned above in our article, only until lately we were able to track most of these countries because they were insignificant to be tracked. In other words, the scores of countries missing do not show up in Facebook’s data itself. Hence, we are not able to include it in the report.